The whole legal system is set up to protect the very wealthy. Prisons are big business and use prison labor for cheap labor for major corporations. Many prisoners are in there for years without redress. There are more people in prison in this country than anywhere else in the world.

We don’t want a system that stigmatizes people for the rest of their lives and is used to keep all of us under control that are not super wealthy.

I'm glad the police did not pursue your bike theft or car break-in because if they did catch the person and arrested them for a survival crime, it would have put one of our mopst vulnerable into the churning maw of the criminal justice system. Get a new bike. Get a new car windo2w. Leave the poor alone.

Here's the budget: In 2020, the proposed Seattle Police Department budget was set at $409,538,851.02. The endorsed amount, the amount the City actually received this year, is $401,715,774 — $2.97 million more than they received in 2019.

Defunding the police means de-militarizing them, Dedicate more resources to health and social services. Disconnect police from services that other organizations should be responsible for (and funded by money taken from the police to fund).

The Seattle police budget for this year is approximately $409 million, which accounts for just over a quarter of the city's general fund budget.

Cutting it in half, as advocates have proposed, could redirect roughly $205 million toward social services addressing homelessness, mental health needs, and the economic disparities facing Black and Brown communities.

https://www.kuow.org/stories/why-defund-the-police-has-become-the-rallying-cry-at-seattle-protests

This is an excellent article on the subject.

Defund the Police
America needs to rethink its priorities for the whole criminal-justice system.
What are the police for? Why are we paying for this?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/defund-police/612682/

2 The police shot and killed my neighbor who was Black for standing on the corner outside his house some years ago. Do you fear for your life because of the color of your skin?

When the NYPD dialed back their policing for a couple of weeks, crime dropped. However, in Baltimore, the police have dialed back their policing for years since Freddie Gray was killed and crime has exploded. There are now between 100 and 150 additional deaths per year, almost all are young, black men. You can site the NYPD example and hope it'll work like that in Seattle, but you should at least mention Baltimore so people are aware of the risks.

Matt, good job. We need more writing like this.

@6 Do you think this would happen to a paraplegic white man? Malik Williams was shot 84 times. He did absolutely NOTHING.

https://newsone.com/3903468/who-is-malik-williams-paraplegic-man-killed-by-washington-police/

@xina If defunding actually means demilitarizing than why not just cal it demilitarizing? Matt B discusses an abbreviated history of policing in the USA broadly, but the world is a different place. Abolishing law enforcement? I'll talk about it, but no magic lever exists to start fresh. Demilitarizing actually has a reasonable chance of happening even with this Congress.
Take a look a closer look at the 1997 National Defense Authorization Act, specifically program 1033. Congress pushed it through and Clinton signed it, and police and sheriffs departments around the country started significantly increasing their procurement of all kinds of weapons of war from military surplus programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1033_program

@10, check it out, Minneapolis is dismantling their department. The police department is a bundle of services that can be unbundled and managed by people without guns. I imagine there will always be a gun-carrying division but it doesn’t need to be all the people.

@10 because it is not JUST demilitarizing, that is one part of it. this is not a matter of semantics. people need to educate themselves instead of insisting people use words that make them feel more comfortable. here's an example you might understand. conservatives want to defund planned parenthood because 3% of the services they provide are abortions. do they want to also defund reproductive health care of women (and men)? okay that might not be the best example since conservatives also do not want people to have access to information or contraception, they just want them to breed like rabbits.

'Defunding the police' isn't simply about taking money away, and this book explains it
Alex Vitale's "The End of Policing" suggests that police are asked to do too many things in society.

“One of the problems that we're encountering here is this massive expansion in the scope of policing over the last 40 years or so,” Vitale told NPR. “Policing is now happening in our schools. It's happening in relation to the problems of homelessness, untreated mental illness, youth violence and some things that we historically associate police with. ...what I'm calling for is a rethink on why we've turned all of these social problems over to the police to manage.”

https://www.sfgate.com/shopping/article/defund-police-the-end-of-police-funding-explained-15317558.php

How the police endanger us and why we need to find an alternative
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing

It means cutting the SPD budget and ESPECIALLY the reserves for defending police who are tried and paying for the illegal actions they take against our people

in HALF.

Think of the 1980s budget percentages.

Then, and only then, do we negotiate.

@rainy -- "No advanced society
on the planet doesn't have a police force."

Your certainty is sometimes
amusing -- like now, for instance:

"A veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged on Sunday to dismantle the city’s Police Department."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/us/protests-today-george-floyd-video.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage#link-512cff3a

Excellent calls
ivy, xina, totomon &
thank you for your Service.

If you would like to be the most alienated African American in the nation at this exact moment head to Wallingford right now.

"Demilitarization" will get you somewhere.

I believe that many people that do not use marijuana (like me, bourgeois old white guy ) voted for legalization in order to remove a bit of power from the police and prosecutors to torment the brown and black and poor folks. The idea is to reduce their scope of interaction with the people, and for god's sake get rid of the military gear.

If you look at the first chart here:
https://edopportunity.org/discoveries/white-black-differences-scores/
you'll see how racist the teachers are. I don't think you can find any data that shows the police are any more racist. If we're curing racism through defunding, why don't we cut funding for the school district too?

I heard the president of the Minneapolis City Council on TV today. They’re already walking back the defunding thing. I think what you’ll see when they’re done with it is a Department of Public Safety (or something like that) that will looka lot like a police department.

Armed security be bbqing

People really ought to think this through. Occasionally citizens have legitimate needs for police intervention, and they want law enforcement to show up pronto. My fear is that white neighborhoods, like Magnolia bluff, Laurelhurst, etc will continue to get served, and Seattle's lower income neighborhoods will not. Or in other words, be careful what you wish for....

What better time to Question Everything
than during a Panfucking Demic I always say.

Perhaps there's a better way to get noticed
than by encuoraging a Nasty little
(Unfair to trumpf!) Virus...

A General Strike'd
get 'em by the (sometimes, Glass) balls.

Just say no to Captalism (for a Day) and
to patriarchy and to a Klepto-Corpstocracy
cum Huge, monopolistic flying vulture leeching Drones
to whom we must bow (or curtsey, ladies!) our undying Fealty when'er their drones pass us by which, you Hope, they always will...

I’m not a fan of eliminating the police department. I live in south Seattle and there are a decent amount of shootings around here. The police seem to be doing a pretty decent job investigating and arresting people involved in these incidents. I want a response when I call 911. Having said that, I firmly believe we should eliminate police unions. They make policing unaccountable.

"...a very short amount of time"?

I mean, in the geological sense of the word, or the age of the Earth or something, the mid-1800s was quite recent. But that's during the Civil War, for Christ's sake. You're talking about 170 years. Brahms hadn't written his first symphony. The lightbulb was still a couple decades away. In fact, it speaks to the resiliency and longevity of the institution...few things have lasted that long in this country. And I say this as a person who is very much not a fan of the cops.

Every recognized country has some law enforcement division, but there are two that have no uniformed police: Switzerland and Vatican City. In fact, it's the Swiss Guard who takes care of matters in Vatican City. However, there is a CONTINENT that has no police at all. Antartica.

There are plenty of countries that have unarmed law enforcement (or armed law enforcement that don't murder people).

Icelandic police do not regularly carry firearms. In 2013 the first fatal police shooting took place where one man was killed. As of October 2019 this remains the only fatal police shooting since Iceland became an independent republic in 1944.

The New Zealand Police do not routinely carry sidearms.

In Great Britain police do not carry firearms.

Generally, all law enforcement officers in the United States are armed with semi-automatic pistols at a minimum.

From guns to neck restraint: How US police tactics differ to those used in Europe and around the world
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/police-tactics-brutality-us-hong-kong-iceland-norway-uk-a9552886.html

American police shoot and kill far more people than their peers in other countries
https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/8/13/17938170/us-police-shootings-gun-violence-homicides

By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries

What a World Without Cops Would Look Like

“Can we come up with a situation where there are fewer killings, and fewer collateral consequences?”

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/06/police-abolition-george-floyd/

@Xina - We are not too far off in our path in our opinions on this. You are citing some solid information. Alex's book is popping up all over my feed, and I'm looking forward to checking it out. Even though we are wildly well armed in this country, I think breaking up the police and sheriff departments into separate hyper focused disciplines, including a smaller, highly paid, uber trained armed division could work.
Semantics in my view, unfortunately, need to be considered here. My ignorance on the general concept of "defunding" the police is an example. If my emotional response to the concept is any indication what millions will think, especially if they are deep in the Fox News echo chamber, it will be be a slog. If Minneapolis city council actually follows through on their vow to "defund", and they are successful it obviously would be a major example for others to build off of.
Personally, I find "demilitarize the police" to be a more effective slogan to potentially move in the same direction, at least in the initial phase.

32: "Cops, the world over, save far more lives than are killed, xina. I challenge you to find a link that shows otherwise."

Just wow.

I challenge you, teardrop to provide a link showing the police save more lives than they kill.

In 2019 the police shot and killed 1004 people.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/

For 2019 we have no official numbers on how many girls and women were raped by police officers, but just about every sex worker will tell you they have been raped by a cop. Sexual assault is the second most common crime committed by the police. Like Jeff Epstein, the police seem to have a special interest in young girls.

https://reason.com/2017/10/13/cops-are-harvey-weinstein-of-sex-work/

How much money did the police steal from primarily poor brown and black people through asset forfeiture in 2019? Well, more than all the money stolen by non-law enforcement criminals during that time combined:

https://theconversation.com/how-the-government-can-steal-your-stuff-6-questions-about-civil-asset-forfeiture-answered-81973

"The Justice Department says it returned more than $4 billion in forfeited funds to crime victims between 2000 and 2016, while handing state and local law enforcement entities at least $6 billion through “equitable sharing.”

You know teardrop, you have this disgusting habit of reflexively and consistently defending police corruption. Perhaps you missed your calling with a police union, or the King Country Prosecutor Office. Like you, their entire focus is on excusing dirty cops who never held accountable.

They say the do it all for the children!

Post #33 is addressed to #31, not #32.

Sorry, but "logic dictate" is not a very data driven, or convincing argument in an environment where 42% of police admit to domestic abuse:
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-officers-who-hit-their-wives-or-girlfriends/380329/

Or when they get rape kits from actual rape victims, not only do they not process them, but actually destroy the rape kits to cover for failing to investigate to the bear minimum level of submitting those kits for testing:
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2018/11/investigates/police-destroyed-rapekits/index.html

"Protect and Serve" has to be one of the most effective propaganda campaign's ever. The police have no legal duty to protect or serve:
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-police-do-not-have-a-constitutional-duty-to-protect.html

And they typically don't with devastating consequences:
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/parkland/florida-school-shooting/fl-ne-florida-school-shooting-commission-day-2-story.html

The closer you look at the police and their focus on harmless lifestyle crimes against the poor combined with amazingly low clearance rate for violent crime like murder, rape and theft (please see Vitale's book "The End of Policing") the more you realize their primary purpose is enforcing white supremacist policing against urban minorities.

As for disaster relief, that is primarily handled by The local National Guard. As we saw with Katrina, during unrest due to natural disaster the police typically form their own criminal gangs to steal from the victimize and poor.

Your mistake is imagining that policing and corruption are two separate things. If a thug murders, rapes, or steals all your belongings, it's cold comfort if he is wearing a blue clown suit when he does it.

Defund the police in large part is a call to defund the criminals with qualified immunity,

@37 -- yeah, I tried your Spellscaster too:

I (foolishly) wanted to add another 1/4 inch to my donkey dong and instead it SHRUNK down to 'average' size. My wife (she was RICH) has since left me for an eunuch; kids were all (17; that we know of) adopted out; and my damn Dog refuses to heel.

What do you Advize, michealpan232?
Another spell? (The Death Spell?!)
[SERIOUSLY?]!

A totally different
Spellscaster?

So, do you know
Obi-Wan Kenobi ?

Defunding the police means removing all funding from the police. The word doesn't leave room for a nuanced meaning. It means what it means.
People who mean something else may accordingly want to use accurate language that isn't so sure to help Trump's re-election effort.